Marked Semiotics: Tactics and Strategies

Abstract

One of Paolo Fabbri’s most recent papers, his plenary speech at the XIV Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, held in Buenos Aires on 9th-13th September 2019, was entitled, ‘Para una semiotica marcada.’ What does this refer to? we might say that it refers to knowledge concerned with intensity. First, for its technical meaning: a term from semi otic metalanguage is used to define semiotics itself. Secondly, for its emotional and psychological meaning: practicing the science of signification as a constitutionally passionate form of life. A knowledge that is in no way ascetic or loftily detached from existence; a knowledge that holds tightly to life as it founds research into meaning conceived as both signified and direction, perception and corporeity. But why play with Jakobson’s famous, not to mention highly delicate terminology, by proposing a ‘marked semiotics’? And how should we understand this particular expression?